**Tibetan Police Mass-Collect DNA And Lawmakers Say U.S. Firm Is Helping**
Tibetan Police Mass-Collect DNA And Lawmakers Say U.S. Firm Is Helping
_Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClear Wire (https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/04/19/tibetan_police_mass-collect_dna_and_lawmakers_say_us_firm_is_helping__149123.html),_
Legendary actor and humanitarian Richard Gere recently made a splash during a visit to Capitol Hill. Sporting a floppy, now pure-white mane of hair, the 73-year-old Gere flashed his still-boyish grin to members of Congress, staff, and visitors who flocked to see him, many snapping photos with the Golden Globe winner which they quickly shared on social media.
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While Gere, who chairs the board of directors for the International Campaign for Tibet, graciously embraced the attention, he had a far more serious message and tone while testifying before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the reason for his Washington visit.
For more than four decades, the “Officer and a Gentleman” and “Pretty Woman” star has used his international fame to urge the global community to do more to help protect the people of Tibet from the Chinese government’s attempts to wipe out their language, culture, and religion.
**Even though the Tibetans have long resisted Chinese repression, the CCP has recently instituted more systematic and sophisticated methods**, utilizing finely tuned digital spying and tracking technology to monitor every citizen’s movements, phone calls, texts, and Internet habits, Gere said.
“China’s surveillance no longer halts at the Tibetan border,” Gere told the commission in late March. “The CCP’s techno-authoritarianism and fear tactics extend to Tibetan communities abroad. This oppression is being perpetrated behind a digital iron curtain to hide reality on the ground. The development of these systems of repression, reaching all the way around the world, reflects the lengths the CCP will go to dismantle the Tibetan civilization.”
China’s escalating repression in Tibet is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s increasingly harsh crackdown against all forms of religion. Over the last few years, news headlines have mainly focused on the more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims incarcerated in labor camps. Xi also has intensified the decades-long persecution of Tibetan Buddhists and practitioners of Falun Gong, a meditative spiritual discipline, and Chinese authorities are stepping up attacks and intimidation tactics against underground Christian churches, targeting both Protestants and Catholics.
Beijing’s assault on Tibetan Buddhism has evolved since its 1950 military invasion, the witnesses testified, transitioning **from destroying religious institutions and banning gatherings and practices to one of tight control with the goal of eliminating core attributes of Buddhism and co-opting Tibetan Buddhists’ rights to determine their own leaders.**
Testifying at the same hearing, Pnepa Tsering, the Sikyong, or head of the Tibetan government in exile, said Chinese authorities are trying to speed up the assimilation of the Tibetan people through large-scale forced relocations of Tibetans from their traditional homeland to Chinese territories and other parts of Tibet.
At the same time, the Chinese government is providing Han Chinese citizens incentives to move to Tibet and is either coercing or forcing children across Tibet into colonial-style boarding schools far away from their families or transferring them to areas in China.
Several witnesses, including Lhadon Tethong, director of the Tibet Action Institute, and Tenzin Dorjee, a senior researcher and strategist at the same group, cited their organization’s groundbreaking 2021 report, which found that 80% of Tibetan children are educated in a vast system of boarding schools run by the CCP, separated from their families and culture. Some as young as four years, Dorjee testified, are forced to take classes that include nursery rhymes and bedtime stories recited only in Mandarin in an all-Chinese environment that includes participating in war re-enactments dressed in Red Army suits.
During the hearing, Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and longtime human rights champion who chairs the commission, cited a 2022 State Department report (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/415610_TIBET-2022-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf) finding that **the CCP has effectively placed Tibetan Buddhism under central government control and subjected Tibetan women to “coerced abortion or forced sterilization.”**
At the end of his testimony, Gere urged members of Congress to follow the money – and scrutinize U.S. and Chinese business interests and any ongoing role these ties have played i…